Issues for Electric Utilities

Next-Generation Storage Heating designed for Renewables and the Smart Grid.

Clean renewable energy like wind power has one weakness, the wind blows hardest at night and not always when it’s needed.

The Shetland Islands, 170 miles northeast of Scotland, has some of the best wind generation potential in the world. But to take advantage of this green resource, the local utility, Scottish and Southern Energy turned to Dimplex to supply a next-generation Smart Grid and energy storage system to manage more of this intermittent generation.

The Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) solution for balancing their electric network with green wind generation growing to 30% of its capacity required:

Interact with SSE’s demand management system to improve their spinning reserve and frequency response issues caused by fluctuating wind loads.

Be cost-effective.

To meet this challenge, Dimplex drew from its 50 years of experience as the world’s largest storage heating manufacturer and developed a next-generation “Smart” storage heater system called Quantum.

The system is designed to work with SSE’s Smart Grid system and other ZigBee based systems to accept surplus wind power when it’s available and store this as heat energy to meet the home’s heating requirements no matter how harsh the North Sea’s island blustery weather.

This solution will provide the forward-looking utility with a system design that will also meet the UK’s low carbon targets.